Hi folks,

as a long term reader of this forum, I finally decided to become an active member and start posting threads. I collected some questions, this bunch of experts surely can help me answering So first Hello to everyone and here comes my question:

In our last session, the question came up, how the cameras of a traffic monitoring system of large cities are secured. I assume that cities like Hamburg or Seattle have huge amounts of cameras for the surveillance of the traffic. I see in principle three possibilities doing this:

1. Connect all cameras by wire. In SR4, this sounds not very reasonable, since everything seems to be wireless. In addition, the network would be rather expensive.

2. Use very secure (and therefore expensive) nodes to access the cameras. I assume every camera to be a kind of commlink, you can hack in, so the firewall should be not too low to prevent the intrusion of script-kiddies.

3. Put the cameras in a master-slave connection with a central node. Sounds good, but as far as I know, the limit is System x2 subscriptions, so for the thousands of cameras, hundreds of central commlinks would be necessary!?

What I actually want to know is, how to hack into these cameras. Can I hack a single camera (option 2), or do I have to break into the central node (option 3 and maybe 1)?

I would imagine they are tiered in some form.

1: City Node (Seattle)
2: City Area Node (Renton/Bellevue etc)
3: Block Node (Central Seattle - X City Block)
4: Street Node (A specific area with X Signal Systems)

So we have a Master Node for the entire city which controls a few Area nodes who in turn monitors a few city blocks. Each city block has X streets or perhaps street nodes to control several different traffic systems*.

* Traffic systems can in this case be clusters of nodes following a set signal algorithm for street signals for example.

In answer to your questions: You should be able to Spoof any level of them to gain access to anything below. But lets assume that the lowest security is 3 (device rating) and add something like +1 for each higher tier and an additional +3 if you want full admin access.